linksys

Making sure that your entire house is blanketed in the ever-so-important waves of Wi-Fi is a huge pain sometimes. Though routers nowadays are much, much better than ever before, their range of coverage is not always sufficient. That's why mesh networks have risen in popularity. And B&H has a deal for you to get started on keeping everyone and everything in your home connected — right now, you can pick up a two-pack of Linksys's Velop AC2600 mesh routers in white for just $99.99, half off the $199.99 asking price.

If you've been curious about switching your home network setup over to a mesh router system, this deal might be worth a look. The Linksys Velop Tri-Band Whole Home Wi-Fi System is on sale at Costco now for $150 off the retail price of $499.99. That makes it just $349.99 for a setup with four nodes, thanks to instant manufacturer's savings.

My family lives in a somewhat large house, and Xfinity's 'Wireless Gateway' router has never done a great job at coverage. Several rooms had poor reception or dead spots, particularly in the upstairs area. I bought a basic Netgear range extender as a band-aid solution, but for whatever reason, some of my devices (including my Google Pixel) still refuse to connect to it.

Last year at CES, Linksys announced its first mesh Wi-Fi system, called 'Velop.' The main selling point was tri-band 2x2 802.11ac connectivity, resulting in no latency loss between the main router and the other nodes. However, the system was rather expensive; a 3-pack would cost you $500. Linksys has now released a cheaper dual-band version, designed to directly compete with the Google Wifi and other consumer mesh systems.

For years, Taiwan-based Foxconn has been best-known for manufacturing Apple products, but it also builds countless other consumer electronics. Today, one of the company's subsidiaries (Foxconn Interconnect Technology) announced it is purchasing US-based Belkin for $866 million in cash. Belkin owns a number of major brands, including Linksys and Wemo.

Mesh WiFi networks are the new trend of the past couple of years. Eero, Luma, Google Wifi, and several others have introduced their own systems of routers that aim to simplify home networking as much as possible by consolidating access points under a single network SSID and letting your WiFi reach more areas of your house without too much headache.

Now Linksys, the company behind some of the most popular routers in the world, is presenting its take on the matter. Velop, which I'm going to assume comes from "envelop" as in enveloping your house with WiFi, is a system of routers in which each node is a Tri-Band 2x2 802.11ac Wave 2 MU-MIMO router that can also work as range extender or bridge.

Last week, Cisco released their Cisco Connect Express app on the market to very little fanfare, though the app is quite impressive. It allows you to control your Cisco/Linksys router from your Android device via WiFi, with the key features listed as:

Guest access – An easy way for visitors to get online. Give password-protected Internet access to visiting friends and family while keeping your own information private. No need to remember the guest password, it’s in the app. Simply email the password to your guest and they’ll be online in no time.